A lot of factors can contribute to a filmmaker delivering the best work of his career. Circumstances from finding the right cast to discovering the right project to getting the ideal financing can combine to make all the difference in the world. Other times, it’s waiting until exactly the right …
Blade Runner — the original, which is to say whichever of the seemingly endless number of versions that are available thanks to studio meddling and the obsessive recutting of director Ridley Scott — is one of my favorite movies. Ill-received at the time of its release and scorned by some …
Harvey Weinstein is the latest. But he isn’t the last. The news that Weinstein, a prominent movie producer and one of Hollywood’s biggest power players, is at the very least a serial sexual harasser of women and at worst a multiple rapist has been met with varied reactions. It’s not …
Darren Aronofsky wants there to be no confusion about the intent behind his new allegorical whatever-it-is, mother!. (I use his preferred stylization of the title, even after everything he has done to me.) Eschewing such aesthetic values as subtlety and ambiguity, Aronofsky has delivered a psychological horror film that he is …
I don’t remember the Battle of the Sexes; I was far too young for it to penetrate my consciousness at age five, or to make anyone in the suburban enclave where I grew up to have much of a stake in it. But I do remember hearing about it, and, given the …
From the archives of Rig Pigs Fortnightly, thirty of the most likely current candidates for the Truck Driver’s Hall of Fame. PEYTON GROTE. Running canned seafood all over New England and the Mid-Atlantic, Peyton was the first hauler to install an octophonic sound system in his rig. Favorite Physical Graffiti side: 2. …
The three pillars of American debauchery are sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. Yacht Rock, too, is held aloft by these indispensable ingredients: sex is a constant presence, even when it’s expressed with some degree of bittersweet poetry from the mouth of a fool. And you wouldn’t be reading these …
Today in downtown Chicago, I heard the Reverend William Barber speak. Barber, the founder of Moral Mondays, follows in a long tradition of black preachers who stand for social, racial, and economic justice; he is an inheritor of the great lineage of Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson, who stood …
Recently, I was listening to the latest episode of Hold My Order, Terrible Dresser, one of my all-time favorite podcasts. Although the week’s guests were not familiar to me, I was delighted, as both a drunk and a huge RPG nerd, to learn that one of them manages a pub in …
Watching classic TV of a previous era is always a dicey proposition. People can get distracted by out-of-date fashions, technologies, haircuts; even the rhythms of speech and the way audiences laugh at things can seem terribly archaic to a younger viewer. The lack of immediacy and the somewhat unchanging nature …
The apocalypse in fiction fulfills a lot of deep, and predictably dark, needs in the human psyche. Zombie stories are usually an exercise in psychopathy, indulging a curiously common instinct to portray the commission of mass murder without moral consequences; tales of nuclear or other technological holocaust portray a surface …
Because of the somewhat reserved nature of leadership in the Democratic Socialists of America, and because it is a brewing scandal that recent events have shown no sign of calming, I wanted to make clear my personal thoughts on the issue of Danny Fetonte’s continued presence on the DSA’s national political …
Cards on the table time: I am not a pacifist. I don’t believe that violence is never an option. I’m opposed to violence and cruelty on general principles, but I don’t think general principles really mean that much, especially when shit is starting to go down. I always reject aggressive …
Michael Shermer, in his book Why People Believe Weird Things, wrote about his workmanlike history of appearing on television chat shows to debate neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionists. Some of his colleagues, he wrote — even ones with impeccable antifascist credentials — told him he was not just wasting his time, but …
We are living, you know, in an age of quality television. Everyone knows it. I know it; you know it; that one guy on Twitter who won’t stop gassing on about The Americans knows it. Television is so good that it would be worth giving up sex for, if anyone ever …
